Page Tools

Related

A journey to Chad was a sobering reality check for a woman who
makes us laugh, writes Roslyn Guy.

It's a long way from Fountain Gate to Chad but that's the
journey Jane Turner took this month. The comedian who has made her
mark on TV as Kath Day-Knight, suburban queen and shopping centre
habitue, returned to Melbourne this week from her first overseas
trip as a special representative of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees.

Sitting in a St Kilda restaurant, toying with her food, she
still seems a bit dazed by the experience. Just three days earlier,
she had been travelling through the desert on the Sudan-Chad
border, visiting refugee camps to see first-hand the lives of
almost 200,000 people seeking sanctuary from violence and famine,
and such a lunch was an unimaginable luxury.

Already petite, Turner lost weight during her week away, but she
says the lack of food was the least of her problems. "It's so hot
you just don't get hungry. I was only out in the first camp for
about 20 minutes and I was sick. I had to go and sit in the car.
The heat is pounding down on you. I don't know how they deal with
it under plastic sheets in summer."

Life in the camps is harsh. Even as winter approaches, the
temperature reaches 45 degrees during the day. And while the UNHCR
tries to raise the money needed to provide enough decent tents
($114 buys an all-season for a family of five), large plastic
sheets, propped up with whatever can be scrounged, are the only
shelter available to thousands of refugees.

Married to a former diplomat, Turner has travelled widely and
has lived in Moscow and Bangladesh. But she had seen nothing like
the hardship and poverty she encountered in Chad.

"This is a shocking, harsh desert climate," she said. "It's
really remote and there's no water, no fuel. The countryside is not
used to having such a high concentration of numbers so the
environment is denuded."

Back in Melbourne, Turner is trying to come to grips with
everything she has seen - the children with bloated stomachs, full
of parasites and prey to diseases long eradicated from the West;
women who have been raped and seen their husbands killed but have
found the strength to trudge hundreds of kilometres to find safety
for their children; aid workers who sacrifice their own needs
providing medicines, food, shelter.

"They work so hard, they live on practically nothing," Turner
said.

"Coming back makes me realise how confusing the modern world is
and how little you need."

She recalls children making toys from sticks and jar lids,
string and dead insects. When she offered them her drink bottle,
"one boy grabbed it and in about two seconds he had about 15 boys
on top of him, wrestling for this water bottle ... I think they
were having a bit of a game but, considering what my children have
got at home, I felt a bit sick."

In the end, it's usually not possessions that make us happy, but
family and friends. Turner knows she's lucky to work with her
friends on Kath and Kim. She and Gina Riley met as
18-year-olds at St Martin's Youth Theatre and she's worked with the
others for years. As for whether they'll continue into a fourth
series, she's not saying. Thursday's final episode of the current
series left their options open - Epponnee's wedding scene turned
out to be all a dream, "maybe a bad dream".